Hello Ambassadors,
I wanted to send everyone an update on Phase V of the Usability Initiative Rollout. This
is the final phase and we are planning on rolling out the usability features (Vector and
enhanced editing features) to all remaining projects that have not yet been switched. The
release date has been set for Sep 1, 2010 at 10am PDT / 5pm UTC.
In preparation for the release, we have been doing the following activities which mostly
revolve around helping us identify bugs and encouraging translations on the remaining
projects:
* Central Notice: We are running a Central Notice [1] across all remaining projects. The
notice informs users of the upcoming changes and asks for their help in translations and
bug identification (see [1a] for landing page). We've asked people to complete the
translations/bug reports by Aug 25, a week before release.
* Bug Identification: We are driving people to Bugzilla [2] and our bug report page on
meta [3] to log bugs. Users can test the new interface by clicking on the "Try
Beta" link at the top of the page on their project. This link will turn on the
Vector and the other new features.
* Feedback: We're also monitoring the feedback page on meta [4] for general feedback
on the features
* Translators-l: Casey B. sent a message to the Translators-l mailing list, asking for
help in translations.
* Wiktionary and Wikisource: we posted to these projects as they are ones which have a
heavy degree of customization and we wanted to alert them specifically of the upcoming
changes.
* Tech blog post: We'll be posting on the tech blog [5] over the next day or so.
We will also post updates on the release plan to the release page [6].
As we're two weeks away from the release date, I'd like to ask for as much help as
possible from our Ambassadors to identify bugs. Reports from our community members are
one of the main ways we find out about stuff not working, so any help would be very much
appreciated.
We'll be sending out more communication as we get closer to the release date. Please
feel free to direct questions to either me or Alolita Sharma (asharma at wikimedia dot
org). I will be out of the office for a few weeks starting Aug 21, but Alolita will be
available for questions.
Thanks again for being an Ambassador!
Howie Fung, Wikimedia Foundation
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Usability_Initiative
[1a]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_design_and_feature_change
[2]
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org
[3]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_design_and_feature_change/Bug…
[4]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_design_and_feature_change/Fee…
[5]
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/
[6]
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Releases/Default_Switch#Phase_V_Deploym…